I understand returned payment fees for checks, but I’ve never been charged for having a credit card decline.
Stupid of me to sign up for auto-payment when I use my credit card for gas, I guess.
Cox is fucking scum.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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Verizon...manually go in every month to OK the funds come straight from checking. Been using the same account for over 20 years and it is SAVED on the Verizon site.. Have plenty of money in the account, then one month it gets rejected for "account not found". Bank says they never even tried and i hit re-submit and it goes through no problem. Clearly a problem with Verizon's payment processing right? But they charge me a $30 "returned" fee and when I reach out to them they wont budge on it.
Verizon one day stopped charging me and canceled my internet out of nowhere. It was coming straight from my checking on auto pay. Then I couldn't access my account to set it up again and it made it hell to get it back up again. Not sure what was going on
Is the name intended as pure irony?
AFAF.
It's expensive being poor. I used to get charged £15 if I didn't have the funds because I wasn't allowed an overdraft. Being unable to pay £5 left me with £-8 frequently. Because apparently I was allowed an overdraft if they did it to me.
I used to be a contractor and was sometimes bad at processing timesheets and invoices.
I had one occasion where I had (numbers made up because it was ages ago) £100 in the business bank account with no overdraft facility when a £150 payment went out.
The payment went out putting me overdrawn. They waited a day before deciding that I wasn’t allowed an overdraft and putting the money back.
During that 24 hour period a payment for £25 was processed and blocked because I was overdrawn.
They then charged me two fees for refusing the payments even though I had money for the second one in the bank.
I switched banks right after that.
When I was doing Amazon Turk - had like $10 to my name, I accidentally clicked on “withdraw funds” instead of “deposit funds” for the $15 I’d spent ten hours earning.
Bank of America charged me $35 for the “overdraft.”
I stood outside of a BoA one time, charged a bunch of shit on PayPal then went in and emptied/drained my account and someone ate 3500 in charges.
I never got a letter, PayPal said everything was fine. I walked away 20 years ago and never set foot in another BoA. Absolute scum bank.
Here's my "Fuck BofA" story. A long time ago now, I was really tight on cash on a Friday and needed a few things before my next paycheck on Wednesday. I knew how much money I had in my account, and knew what I could afford, and what I couldn't afford. I couldn't afford the gas for my car if I bought my groceries and paid a few other bills, which meant that I would just overdraft the card for the gas. I'd be about $10 short of filling up the tank, so I was okay with paying the $35 overdraft fee for the gas, because I needed it to get to work. I did the math, and I'd be roughly -$50 when it was all said and done.
Come Monday, I find that I'm at -$500. I look at my account history, and I see that BofA reorganized all my transactions from the weekend, processing them from largest to smallest. So instead of ONE large purchase overdrafting my account and accruing a single overdraft fee, they hit me with like 6 overdraft fees because of all of the smaller, ~$5 purchases I had made that weekend.
I fought with them for months, telling them that I'd pay the single overdraft fee if they agree to charge me based on the timeline in which I actually made the purchases, but they refused to budge, and eventually closed down the account, and also blacklisted me from opening an account with any major bank again.
The next year, a law was passed that made it so they can't do that anymore. But the law didn't make them pay back anybody that they already fucked over.
We too were victims of the BoA shuffle which maximized what fee they'd hit us with. Was one of many reasons why we said goodbye and joined a credit union.
I knew exactly what your story was going to be about by the end of the first sentence. It's so common that it's immediately predictable. Fuck BofA and their bullshit.
A lot of banks like to do that biggest to smallest it seems. The one I asked about it gave an excuse of 'the bigger payments are probably things like rent or car payments and we wouldn't want THOSE to bounce since there was some hard cutoff to the amount they let you overdraw. Nonsense of course, but that was the line given.
It’s your responsibility to manage your finances, not theirs. It’s bullshit that they’d even consider any method of processing payments other than first come, first served.
Yeah, but consider it as a holdover from when people used to pay with these things called checks (cheques) that would only have a date not an exact time stamp and instant electronic processing. The bank would receive a stack of them you paid on Saturday, but they wouldn't know when exactly.
It was still nonsense that would cause as many overdraft fees as possible to punish the poor, but they didn't have a way to say who was truly first.
Disabling overdraft is the first thing people should do when opening a bank account. It's extremely predatory.
Wells Fargo made a lot of money on ‘Sort Order Optimization’
Say you have $100 in your bank account. You buy a candy bar for $2 from a vending machine, a coke for another $2, fill up $20 worth of gas, and then spend $100 on groceries. You’d think one overdraft charge, for the groceries, right?
Nope. The groceries will be taken out first, then the gas, then the candy bar and coke. Three overdraft charges.
It’s expensive being poor - and they knew that:
“Given our dependence on a small set of OD consumers (4% generate 40% of total OD/NSF revenue),” Zimmerman wrote, “a small change in behavior within this group can cause a large change in revenue.”
That is so fucked up
And is now illegal, thankfully.
For the next couple weeks, I'm sure. The financials are watching all the axes being taken to regulation in the industrial sector and I'm sure they're gonna want in on that scene at some point.
I hope you are with a local or regional credit union now.
Yep! I actually closed my account pretty much immediately afterwards, and went with a local credit union which has been consistently great! They gave me a really good rate when I needed a car loan, have floated me if I was a little short before my direct deposit came in…
Glad to hear it. This is one of the best "small things" you can help people with, in my opinion. BofA is so predatory. I switched to a credit union here in Seattle from them years ago. It was literally the first time I actually earned money in savings rather than it be melted away by fees.
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I'm decades old. The lesson I learned over decades is to NEVER sign up for autopay. NEVER. THERE'S NOT A COMPANY OUT THERE THAT BUGS YOU FOR AUTO PAY THAT WON'T ABUSE YOU.
Bill pay pushed from your bank account is okay -- you can get even set up limits where it'll cancel the payment if a bill is unexpectedly large.
Letting creditors pull from your bank account is what isn't okay.
I really like SEPA mandates for this. Yes, they're pull, but you can cancel them with one click within 52 days, and the money is back in your account in a few hours (if not instantly).
Most companies that use it are very clear, since auto-pay by law needs a reminder or the refund is an automatic legal cancellation of the contract. (Of course, this is sometimes disguised as an upsell, mostly by telco's or "disruptive startups").
And they work across Europe, so my German cloud provider can use debits to pull the money from my Durch bank account.
The US not having such a consumer friendly system is really unfortunate, but not surprising.
The US not having such a consumer friendly system is really unfortunate, but not surprising.
Well, they're consumer friendly, so of course the US won't have them.
Totally get this in concept, but I'd be paying more in late fees without autopay
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Yeah, this is a hard lesson everyone should take to heart.
Edit: to add, most banks will allow you to set up automatic payments to go out to companies. This is a far better method because it doesn't put your finances in the hands of an unscrupulous corporation. (Well, other than your bank but those are the dice we roll)
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That text looks like a scam
As does the end of our conversation.
Fuck Cox.
Cox is really living up to their namesake of being a bunch of dicks.
You are also getting Max subscription plan with this, This will completely boost up your internet speed and you will be amazed by the higher speed and smooth service.
Oh, so smooth. Doubling that arbitrary throughout limit will obviously improve latency and jitter. I always have my network fully saturated all day, every day /s
Everything will be super fast and when you stream or browse there will be no buffering or interruptions and you will have a great experience
Yes, because buffering is caused by your inability to download 62 more megabytes of video a second. It's totally not because the server isn't sending video fast enough or anything. Fucking slimeball.
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"I have instructed my staff to handle your information request, you have been charged a 'contact information handling' fee of 50 dollars"
Yeah that checks out. I've found out about this in a doubly infuriating scenario.
I was home abroad on a holiday, and they billed me for my regular monthly service. So naturally, i got slapped with the 25$ rejection fee, and then my bank decided to pay the overdraft on the second attempt, resulting in another 45$ in bank fees for that too.
Everything in the US is purposefully designed to fuck you over.
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Same for Verizon. Or if your bank account doesn’t have enough funds. Or even if it does, and your bank says the transaction never happened, as long as Verizon says it happened, they charge you a fee.
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I'm a Cox customer only because I have no better options.
This is by design. It's called a mini-monopoly and our government should have put a stop to is 50 years ago.
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Time to cancel cox. 👍
My landlord charged me $250 for replacement of the original shower head through an "expert" (i used my own and didn't fasten the hose enough on moving out). 😢
TWN did that to me too. My card expired and I called to give them the new number. They ran it without the new expiration date because the numbers were identical.
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